NSF Workshop: Modeling Research in the Cloud

31 May - 2 June 2017, Boulder, Colorado

Historically, the atmospheric modeling community has relied
mostly on high performance computing (HPC) facilities (e.g.,
NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing facility and XSEDE) and local
computing clusters to perform their simulations and conduct their research. With the maturity of
and significant advances in cloud computing, it has recently
emerged as an alternative new paradigm for hosting and
delivering a broad array of services over the Internet.
Cloud Computing is a general term that describes a range of
services for storage, data, software, and processing power
via the Internet "cloud" rather than a local (e.g.,
departmental or campus) computer center or a central high
performance computing (HPC) facility. In such an
environment, we foresee a near-future in which a larger
community of users, newly empowered and facilitated by the
cloud, can readily access their data and applications from
any device, perform virtually all of their analysis,
visualization and processing remotely, and share their
results and collaborate more easily. There is broad
consensus that as data volumes grow rapidly, it is
particularly important to reduce data movement and bring
processing and computations to the data.

It is clear that there exist several challenges in
research and computational practices that need to be
overcome before cloud computing becomes a viable platform
serving the atmospheric modeling community. The purpose of
the workshop is to facilitate an in-depth discussion of the
myriad aspects and formulate approaches for integrating
cloud computing capabilities into the weather and climate
prediction landscape and discuss the significance of such
integration for advancing discoveries.

To that end, some specific goals of the workshop are to:

raise awareness of the emerging technologies in the
age of cloud computing and data-driven science in the
atmospheric prediction community;

explore the different cloud options that are available,
the benefits of conducting modeling research in the cloud,
and understand the associated challenges;

investigate what types of modeling research, scales of
problems, and operational situations are likely to benefit
from moving to the cloud vs. using local clusters and HPC
facilities;

discuss a way forward and the steps to take to develop
an end-to-end data, computational, software and modeling
ecosystem in the cloud.